Message – Fernando Pessoa

Message, one of the greatest poems in the whole of Portuguese literature, was Fernando Pessoa’s only book written in Portuguese to be published during his lifetime. It is out of an atmosphere of general European decline, and with unwavering focus on his own country in particular, that Pessoa orchestrates his Message: a telling of the great events and protagonists behind the genesis of Portugal, of the golden age of maritime discovery and of subsequent national entropy, all of it predictive and flowing towards the future construction of a new and different empire: the Fifth Empire, which, in the author’s vision, would be a matrix of spirituality, messianism and millenarianism. This bilingual edition, with translations by Martin Earl, is introduced and annotated by António Apolinário Lourenço and illustrated by Fatinha Ramos.